During the just-concluded Spring Festival, Jimei tourism achieved a "strong start," with its revenue-generating capacity significantly improving. Data shows that during the 2019 Spring Festival holiday, Jimei district accommodation establishments hosted 96,500 overnight visitors, a year-on-year increase of 17.26%, with an average occupancy rate nearing 80%. The average length of stay rose from 1.5 days to 2 days, with total visitor numbers reaching 969,700 and tourism revenue hitting 513 million yuan. The surge in popularity also boosted hotel and catering revenues, with multiple hotels such as the Holiday Inn Resort Xiamen North Bay and the Lion King Hotel reporting catering incomes exceeding one million yuan. Riding this positive momentum, Jimei tourism is gearing up for the Lantern Festival travel season, seizing the tail end of the winter vacation to offer visitors a unique family-friendly experience.
At a new stage where tourism shifts from high-speed growth to high-quality development, Jimei district, as an important administrative region of the tourist city of Xiamen, has seen continuous improvement in both its "charm index" and "revenue index," serving as strong evidence of its rapid catch-up and high-quality development. In recent years, under the guidance of cultural and tourism authorities in Fujian Province and Xiamen City, the Jimei District Party Committee and government have focused on building six major industrial chains and seven key investment projects, precisely targeting the family market, deepening the implementation of supply-side structural reforms and innovations in tourism, and creating tourism products with innovative thinking to meet visitors' consumption needs. These efforts continuously enhance the quality and experience of tourism, attracting more visitors to Jimei for travel, accommodation, and spending. This has fostered a comprehensive tourism "Jimei model" that integrates "brand events + integrated marketing + immersive experiences + quality consumption," promoting a shift in Jimei tourism from "quantity" to "quality." From 2016 to 2018, Jimei district saw its tourist numbers and revenue triple, maintaining the highest growth rates in the city. Notably, during the 2018 National Day holiday, Jimei district’s tourist numbers ranked first in Xiamen for the first time, and its accommodation and catering sector recorded the city’s highest annual growth rate in 2018.
Precise positioning and innovative products boost revenue
"The family market is a high-quality tourism market and also a key focus for Jimei tourism development. This Spring Festival, various festive activities across the district’s scenic spots and hotels created a rich and diverse experience, making Jimei a truly unique destination for families," said a Jimei district official. Leveraging big data analysis, Jimei’s major scenic areas planned distinctive family-oriented events, quickly drawing in crowds.
At the Chengyi Science and Technology Exploration Center, the Snow Park and the "Hezheng Ancient Animal Fossil Exhibition" became the most popular attractions for children, receiving a total of 30,700 visitors over five days, a year-on-year increase of 55.3%. Tianmu Hot Springs created a uniquely charming "Hot Springs Light Show," maximizing the area’s leisure and entertainment appeal, hosting 6,000 visitors, a rise of 18.5%. The popularity of Jimei’s nighttime tourism offerings this Spring Festival also encouraged visitors to extend their stays. The Lion King Circus’ Lunar New Year show, "Dancing Dragons and Phoenixes, Golden Pigs Celebrate the New Year," was a sell-out, with the scenic area receiving 94,700 visitors, up 18.6% year-on-year. Performing arts also saw great success with "The Legendary Show of Southern Fujian" at Xiamen Old Courtyard, which was fully booked throughout, hosting 111,000 visitors, a 13.1% increase. Additionally, events such as the Prayer and Flower Festival at Yuanbo Garden and the Fruit and Cartoon Festival at the Fruit Park were full of New Year cheer, offering visitors a different highlight every day in Jimei.
During the New Year period, the average proportion of individual visitors to Jimei’s scenic areas rose from 50% to 60%, with self-guided tours and family trips becoming the main drivers of consumption. Major scenic area revenues also increased substantially, enhancing the economic benefits of tourism. Yuanbo Garden received 4% more visitors, but ticket revenue surged by 31.2%, amounting to 2.001 million yuan. The Lion King International Circus City saw an 18.6% rise in visitors and a 35.5% increase in ticket revenue, with 94,200 visitors generating 10.7664 million yuan. Notably, secondary consumption such as food and shopping within the scenic areas was also booming, further driving up tourism economic benefits.
While individual scenic areas made their own efforts, Jimei also adopted an innovative "cross-sector integration" approach to create tourism products, developing offerings such as "tourism + culture," "tourism + sports," "tourism + wellness," and "tourism + technology" to comprehensively meet the consumption needs of different groups. During the Spring Festival, Jimei tourism launched a series of "Family Visits" products, bundling services for locals hosting relatives and friends during the holidays. Rural sports and leisure tourism and eco-experience tours centered around scenic spots such as Shuanglongtan and Tasman also attracted many urban visitors. Meanwhile, the new Xiamen Library branch and the cultural and creative block Jimei Dashe quickly became popular Instagram-worthy spots in Jimei, rapidly driving up visitor traffic.
Service innovation enhances immersive tourism experience and visitor retention
"Quality tourism is an inevitable trend in the evolution of the tourism industry. Only by perfecting every detail can we enhance the quality of tourism and keep visitors coming back," based on this understanding, Jimei continues to refine and innovate its tourism services, encouraging more visitors to stay longer in Jimei.
During the Spring Festival, the Jimei Tourist Shuttle — the iconic Dingding bus — operated throughout the holiday, providing direct access to scenic areas and hotels, solving the problem of transportation inconvenience for visitors. At the same time, the bus service facilitated guest flow between different scenic spots. In addition, during the New Year period, the Jimei Dingding Bus offered special group booking discounts and customized travel routes based on individual needs, giving residents and tourists a VIP Jimei tourism experience.
The Jimei district also tailored its services to the characteristics of Spring Festival travelers, focusing on consumer demand and using more humanized services to enhance the tourism experience and boost local spending. During the holiday, Jimei produced a food, play, shopping, and entertainment guide, which was placed directly in hotel rooms for targeted marketing. At the same time, training was enhanced for hotel staff on scenic spot knowledge and for scenic area staff on hotel and catering information, turning personnel from both sectors into mutual promoters and effectively addressing tourists' New Year dining needs. Through this collaborative innovation, hotels and scenic areas referred guests to each other, promoting mutual publicity, cooperation, and mutual benefit across all tourism resources in the district.
Meanwhile, during the Spring Festival, Jimei district also stepped up tourism market regulation and management. Through multiple pre-holiday preparations, in-holiday monitoring, and joint law enforcement involving tourism, traffic police, fire control, market supervision, pricing, law enforcement, and health authorities, the district ensured that residents and visitors could enjoy a safe and joyful holiday in Jimei.
Each scenic area and hotel in Jimei paid attention to every detail, providing humanized, intimate, and personalized services, which further extended the length of stay for overnight visitors. According to statistics, the average occupancy rate of accommodation facilities in Jimei during the Spring Festival continued to rise, nearing 80%, with the average length of stay increasing from 1.5 days to 2 days. Despite an overall increase of nearly 3,000 beds, the occupancy rate of star-rated hotels remained high, with the top three — Lion King Hotel, Beihaiwan Wanda Hotel, and Ridong Garden Hotel — achieving occupancy rates of 89.45%, 86.5%, and 83.6% respectively. In addition, distinctive homestays emerged strongly, with nine registered homestays on Jimei Street achieving over 90% occupancy this spring.
Integrated marketing boosts visibility for scenic areas and hotels
"During the Spring Festival holiday, the Chengyi Science and Technology Exploration Center became one of the most popular scenic spots in Xiamen. In addition to the strong appeal of its own special events, this success was also due to the mutual collaboration and joint marketing between scenic areas and hotels this year," said Lin Jiexing, head of the Chengyi Science and Technology Exploration Center.
In recent years, to promote higher-quality tourism, Jimei district has conducted precise market analysis and introduced big data analytics and third-party evaluations. It innovatively created the "International Jimei Festival," a unique tourism IP for Jimei, which organically connects and integrates brand events with the district’s scenic spots, hotels, commerce, and other tourism resources into an upgraded tourism platform. Relying on the Jimei Festival, tourism marketing methods have been continuously upgraded, with precise positioning and integrated online-offline strategies driving tourism growth.
During this year’s Spring Festival, Jimei district placed greater emphasis on the linkage and synergy of tourism resources across the district, innovatively launching series such as "New Year Ji Fortune" and "New Year Dingding Lucky Draw." From the first to the fifteenth day of the lunar New Year, residents and visitors could visit designated check-in spots at scenic areas or ride the Dingding bus daily to participate in red envelope giveaways, bringing good luck for the new year. This activity not only provided discounts to visitors but also united various scenic areas, promoting collaboration across the district’s tourism resources and further boosting overall tourism popularity.
In intensifying marketing efforts, Jimei district fully tapped into the power of self-media marketing, continuously upgrading promotional methods. By tagging visitors, marketing became more precise — for example, actively targeting family and student groups, and creatively using diary-check-in formats for content discovery. In addition, Jimei tourism also utilized trendy new media marketing tools such as creative posters, short videos, and online prize-winning activities, helping the tourism industry boom. Notably, the official "Jimei Tourism" WeChat account frequently ranked first among county- and city-level WeChat accounts in Fujian for tourism influence. During the Spring Festival, the Jimei Tourism WeChat account saw a 6.6-fold increase in followers compared to normal times; its Baidu search index on mobile devices rose 212% year-on-year and 54% month-on-month.
Tourism merchandise innovation strongly drives market consumption
Jimei tourism has consistently used innovative thinking to develop tourism derivative products, creating tourism merchandise and peripheral recommendations to meet market demands and enhance the district’s revenue-generating capacity, thereby stimulating market consumption.
Different from traditional tourism merchandise, Jimei tourism innovatively integrated "study tours" with derivative products, creating distinctive offerings with stronger cultural and tourism attributes. During the Spring Festival, Jimei’s major scenic areas chose different focal points based on their own features, developing unique study tour courses and products. The Lion King Animal Kingdom focused on packaging the giant panda, a national treasure, to promote panda-related science education. The Chengyi Science and Technology Exploration Center hosted the Hezheng Ancient Animal Fossil Exhibition and also offered over ten science courses such as "Deep Space Decoding" and "The Ever-Changing Moon Phases," bringing joy to many visitors.
In the development of study tour derivative products, Jimei continuously tapped into its own scenic areas and university resources, emphasizing the integration of tourism products with cultural education. Guided by the "Four Beams and Eight Pillars" concept, it enriched the content and spatial layers of Jimei’s study tour products. In 2018, Jimei district established a "1+X" diversified study tour system, including one study tour headquarters, 29 study course bases, and over 600 sub-courses. It also developed several study tour brands such as the Jimei International Cultural Exchange Season for Chinese and Foreign Students and Cross-Strait Study Tour Exchanges.
Jimei tourism also adhered to a "people-oriented" philosophy, creating a novel online derivative product — the "Jimei Tourism" mini-program. Free to download, data-efficient, and easy to use, it serves as an official online ticketing and information service platform, comprehensively meeting users’ tourism needs for Jimei and becoming a handy travel companion for visitors.
Additionally, Jimei designed and produced various tourism derivatives based on market demands, such as hand-drawn postcards, the nation’s first tourism-themed "Monopoly" online mini-game, Jimei gesture-based E-Tong cards, and custom souvenirs for scenic areas. It also built an online trading platform and marketing IP brand for tourism, continuously enhancing the added value and brand depth of Jimei tourism, expanding the city’s brand influence, and laying a solid foundation for sustained growth in tourism income.
Spring Festival scenic area event innovations are just a microcosm of Jimei’s deepened implementation of supply-side reforms in tourism. Since 2016, Jimei district has been developing the "International Jimei Festival," described as a tourism version of "Ctrip + Taobao." Backed by official Jimei production, it hosts large-scale brand events such as the Family Gathering Festival, Cross-Strait Temple Fair, and Migu Half Marathon, quickly generating business opportunities and transforming "tourism off-seasons" into "peak seasons." At the same time, it packages major brand events with discounted offers from Jimei’s scenic areas and hotels for unified integrated marketing, precisely targeting the family market to create the most comprehensive range of tourism products and drive continuous improvement across the district’s tourism sector.
Next, Jimei district will continue to push forward supply-side reforms and innovations in the cultural tourism industry. Using the "Jimei Festival" as a platform, it will focus on building a comprehensive tourism framework, linking cultural, sports, and tourism projects across the jurisdiction to create a collective effect. This will form a systematic tourism landscape that is resource-optimized, spatially ordered, product-rich, and industrially advanced, advancing "big tourism, big industry, big market, and big development." This will genuinely enhance the quality and level of Jimei tourism development, establishing it as the "most beautiful tourism destination" and providing visitors with an integrated "eat, drink, play, entertain, shop, and learn" service package, achieving the "small goal" of making "visitors to Xiamen definitely stay in Jimei."